Game Day: Gating to Random Destinations

This week’s Game Day sees us returning to the Dark City campaign to wrap-up our quest to save a bunch of kidnapped kids from some dungeon-dwelling kobolds. It’s a fun adventure, but I find myself straining to connect it to a Game Day column. So instead I’m going to stick with the semi-random rambling approach that I took last time around.

I just discovered GamerBling earlier this week; digging through the site turned up a review of Q-Workshop dice. In short, they like the dice, but have issues with clarity and inking. Now that I own two sets (Elvish and Cthulhu), I’ll agree with the clarity issue. While these are beautiful dice, some sets — like the Elvish runes — can be hard to read once you start throwing them around the table. I prefer my yellow-lettering-on-black-background Cthulhu dice, which are far easier on the eyes.

Dungeon Mastering suggests mind-mapping the connections between between player characters and villains/NPCs. This is a cool idea — I can see it being particularly useful in our Dark City campaign. We’re running it anthology style right now, with each player taking a turn as a GM, and creating a public version of a map like this (including rivalries between organizations, as well as the PCs) might be a useful way of keeping track of what’s going on.

Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has 3,304 feats appearing in dozens of official sources. That’s a hell of a lot of feats, and it can be next to impossible to remember exactly where you saw a particular write-up. If you need help sorting through them, check out Wizards of the Coast’s Feat Index, which lists every last one of them, the source book it appeared in (with page number) and a one-line description of the feat.

I’ve been on a huge Stargate kick of late. So much so that I’ve been contemplating how to run a game of it using Savage Worlds, which seems like just about a perfect fit to me. Not that it’s likely I would be able to run it, as Hardcorhobbs and I are the only ones in our group who are that into it, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. There are fan-created rules [pdf] for doing exactly that which I’m hoping to read this weekend.

Another option would be to use RISUS. I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow explains why it’s a good fit. While I agree that you could do it, I think it lacks a certain crunchiness that I’d like from a Stargate game. Admittedly, you can go too far in that direction, as was certainly the case with the Spycraft 1.0-powered Stargate RPG by Alderac, but I think Savage Worlds offers just enough crunch to get the job done.

As I mentioned previously, my gaming group’s started up a Graphic Novel Book Club. First up was Watchmen. Next up is the manga title Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 1.

%d bloggers like this: